The quick or short Language Questions Thread (not grammar)

With English or Japanese subtitles?

If with English subtitles, it might make some sense to first watch it with them on and then after a while without any subtitles to be able to focus on listening, already knowing what the stuff is about.

1 Like

So I just encountered this word while reading a manga ゆったりめ and I was wondering what the purpose of the め is here? Looking it up on google it seems to commonly be used as a meaning like loose clothing but I can’t tell what the difference is between that and just ゆったり. I feel like it could be the め meaning like somewhat …, …-ish, etc. but the articles I read about that and everywhere I’ve seen it previously that form seemed to only be used for adjectives. Would anyone happen to be able to tell me what’s going on here?

Do you have any additional context like a sentence it appeared in?

1 Like

I don’t know if I would liken this め to something like 多め’s め.

If you saw it used specifically for clothing, that is.

In fashion, its just a suffix used more to denote a certain style and while it probably came from the ish origin (idk, someone who wants to google can find that), it doesn’t really mean ish anymore. The most common one is definitely 綺麗目 ime, but you’ll see 派手目, ゆったり目, etc.

4 Likes

Yeah, basically what’s going on is one of the characters (ゆき) got tea on his clothes while visiting a friend. The clothes that was at their house didn’t exactly fit right and that’s when this happens -

(mother speaking) …お母さんね最近太っちゃって。(speaking to daughter) 駅前のお店でゆったりめのスウェット買ってきてくれる?それをゆきさんに貸してあげましょ

1 Like

ohh ok that makes sense, thank you!

2 Likes

Is there a yamato word for china?

You mean like, an ancient / old timey word for the country?

From what I’ve seen from history books and historical fiction, pre-revolutionary China was often referred to by dynasty, like 清 (しん) for Qing dynasty leading up to the 1900s, or ancient ones I’ve seen in the context of like, early Japanese dealings with China, like 魏 or 秦.
Like as one example, what’s in English the “First Sino-Japanese War” is in Japanese 日清戦争. Or the main wikipedia page for Qing China from 1616 to 1912 is just titled
So by that metric there’s lots of older names for China, it just depends who was in charge at the time.
I kinda like how Weblio puts it mid definition: 周・秦・漢・三国・南北朝・隋・唐・宋・元・明・清などの時代を経て

… After giving that answer though I realized you probably meant like, an exclusively Japanese-derived word for China. That I don’t know - but maybe the answer I ended up giving is interesting to someone anyway!

3 Likes

Yes. I want to know if there is such a thing, and if there isn’t, what did they call china/chinese people? Just a general term for non-japanese or overseas people?

I’m incredibly new to Japanese and have not touched counters yet, so didn’t want to make a mistake in something I’d be looking at daily.

I’m making a little Pomodoro tracker for myself (in Japanese at least as much as I can, to get a tiny bit more immersion in) and was curious how to denote “session 1”, “session 2” etc. in Japanese, especially in a shorthand form. I’ve seen online articles in Japanese talking about the technique use the phrase セッションのポモドーロテクニック (or just セッション once the context has already been established), but I’m struggling to find a way to make that shorter. Would 「1回」、「2回」 etc. work here or should I use something different?

Looking around wikipedia a bit, I think 漢 is the closest I’ll get to the answer you’re looking for. That’s Han, like the Han people are still 漢民族 today, and 漢 is used to mean China in plenty of contexts. And it looks like the earliest evidence mentioned in that article is like, stuff like an inscription with 漢委奴國王 on it.
I think it’s hard to leave behind a not-Chinese-influenced-at-all name for China to historical posterity when it’s been thousands of years and the written language was Chinese. (but I’d be curious to hear if someone has a better answer)

2 Likes

That’s a chinese word. I mean, jisho only gives me “on-yomi: kan” :stuck_out_tongue:

@Jonapedia ?

In terms of counters, 回 could work I think. Or you could just use the generic 〜つ or 〜個 counters.

However, it’s important to note that there’s a distinction between counting and ordinal numbers. When you say “session 2”, that’s not the same as saying “2 sessions”, that’s the second session. That means you either have to prefix 第 before the number, or you have to suffix 目 behind the counter, so like 第2回, 2回目 or 2つ目 to denote the second occurrence.

However it’s also been pointed out to me earlier in the thread that loan words can function as counters as well, so you might be able to just say 2セッション目 or 第2セッション to be specific.

2 Likes

Yeah that’s what I meant - it seems like as far as I can tell historically Chinese people and governments were referred to by the various names they called themselves.
Chinese influence goes back a really really long time, to the point that evidence is murky for exactly what some of the first interactions were like, is my understanding at least. So I think it makes sense that the names for the place where the writing system originated would be more straightforward than the place where it didn’t, I suppose (in surviving written sources at least). (again though, happy to be overruled)

2 Likes

Oh, thank you so much! I hadn’t even thought about counting vs ordinal numbers and had no idea about the prefixes and suffixes you mentioned, it’s a huge help! Time to add the kanji to my planner and Anki deck then :slight_smile: Again, thank you!

1 Like

Not really. If you run through the section of this Japanese Wiki article about the names of China (中国 - Wikipedia), you’ll see that none of them is really of Japanese origin. The one that was used by Japan around WWII, especially – reportedly – after China lost the first Sino-Japanese War, was 支那. China found it insulting, but Japanese definitions don’t mention any sort of pejorative meaning, and it ultimately has Indian roots (Sanskrit, specifically), it seems.

2 Likes

Can anyone tell me what the ち does in ‘小林さんちのメイドラゴン’ (manga title) ?

1 Like

It’s short for の家, usually it gets shortened to んち but because さん already ends in ん it’s just ち.

So it’s 小林さんの家のマイドラゴン - the dragon maid of Ms. Kobayashi’s home.

7 Likes

That’s interesting. Thanks!

1 Like

It’s the payback for 倭人 lol